Networking giant Cisco Systems, Inc. is opening an incubator in the University of Waterloo’s David Johnston Research + Technology Park to help Waterloo Region startups and students tap into the company’s equipment, expertise and global ecosystem.
The 2,000-square-foot facility, on the third floor of the Cora Building where Agfa HealthCare and other firms are already housed, will also serve as a Waterloo base for 10 to 12 Cisco employees, UW and Cisco officials announced at the site today.
Asked by Communitech if the company plans to engage the broader Waterloo Region tech ecosystem through the new facility, Cisco Canada president Nitin Kawale said, “We absolutely want to do that; we’ll have to just figure out the processes and how to facilitate that . . . we’ll figure it out as we go along.”
Joe Deklic, vice-president of Cisco Canada’s strategic investments group, said the company will “not try to reinvent the wheel” with its new incubator, but will tap into what’s already here and “participate in the way things have been moving along.”
The Cisco Incubation Centre was announced along with a $1-million commitment from the company to fund a new research chair at Waterloo to research and develop smart power grid technology.
The Cisco Chair in Smart Grid will be occupied by Professor Srinivasan Keshav of Waterloo’s computer science faculty, who also holds a Canada Research Chair in tetherless computing.
“Waterloo has a well-earned reputation for excellence in engineering in the province of Ontario, partly due to its commitment to create a critical mass of scholars and research support infrastructure,” Kawale told a gathering in the new Cisco space.
That commitment was coincidentally acknowledged today when Maclean’s magazine released its annual university rankings, and named Waterloo Canada’s most innovative university for the 21st year in a row.
UW president Feridun Hamdullahpur reiterated Waterloo’s focus on excellence in research in engineering, environment, science and technology. He added that UW’s collaboration with Cisco would help continue that excellence, as well as “build innovative solutions within the area of energy systems so that we may address some of the challenges facing us today.”
The new space already boasts a key piece of the company’s technology, Cisco TelePresence, a collaboration tool that enables easy video conferencing and content-sharing from any device – well, almost any.
During a live TelePresence demonstration for media after today’s announcement, Hamdullahpur interjected to ask, “I didn’t bring my BlackBerry PlayBook with me this morning, but if I had brought it with me, would I have been able to see the same thing on it?”
Kawale replied, “Today, we’re certainly working with (Research In Motion) and having discussions around being able to leverage video, but . . . we don’t have the client available for it.”
Deklic added that “RIM are fantastic partners” with whom Cisco is engaging in joint development, and that the two companies are currently working on “a whole bunch of stuff.”
Today’s demonstration included a video chat with Dale Gann, past president of the Association of University Research Parks in Canada, who had dialled in from the Vancouver Island Technology Park in Victoria.
Cisco aims to link all 26 such parks across Canada via Cisco TelePresence, and tap into another 600-plus research parks worldwide.
